New Character Development System: Master Level.

Back in the day, when we used to make XP parties we picked people who were rank 10. I remember people saying "that guy is rank 10 get him, he'll be good" We always look for ways to see who is and is not good party member for the content we were doing.

In games that allow players to have large skill gaps (and FF11 does) people will look for tells you are or are not ready for the content and possibly ruin the whole group. In games that are faceroll, nobody cares cause there is no skill gap and endgame is pretty easy anyway (which is why certain games are so easy and key jobs like tank and healer keep being nerfed, and why that makes them popular).

Do you think a dungeon finder would work on FFXI for harder content, as in any 99 tank or DD could work in any content? Do you really? If not then you already answered your question as to why people are picky, when someone asks for a REMA w/e it's normally just a lazy way to see if someone is geared for the content (cause if you put the time in to get one, chances are you put the time in the rest of the slots and how to play). If you often send that person a tell and say you don't have such and such but you do have good gear, they will often invite you.

If you want to play a game that allows players to have large gaps in skill / gear then you have to accept players are going to find ways to not have to kick someone that turns up in sparks gear. It's far less obnoxious to ask for a REMA tank / healer / buff than have them in the party and see they have less abilitiy to tank harder content than the brd does.

I've made groups, it really sucks to be stuck with the option of booting this person now or doing the run you know you're going to fail. It's easier to put the bar high at the start and not have to deal with it. Again, if you're well geared and send them a tell saying you don't have such and such but have good gear, they will often still invite you.

I think some of you have never built a pug party and don't know how it goes.

It has nothing to do with soloing well. You're only alone to prove that you didn't have someone carry you. It wouldn't be a measure of anything without consistency so you'd have to limit everyone to the same conditions.

I was talking about the original label from job points in that post, not the current system.

Using same limited gear for everyone in a game that is gear based is totally counter intuitive. How would you execute that too? You would be magically equipped with same gear after joining some instance? I imagine it would be super hard to develop. Otherwise how? Force everyone to carry some basic gear listed as "limited gear" for the event? Good luck with that for 20 jobs, when we have super big problems carrying gear even without that. Not to mention special macros for everything (I guess you could simply turn off gearswap, but what with people that use normal macros? Do them again without gear swaps?). Otherwise I could agree that job specific solo tasks could be ok, just this gear limitation is unrealistic.

just filling in on this joined a ambuscade D yester5day
dual boxing whm and brd.
on my brd i took first place in DPS competing with the cor.
The war was constantly 3rd place with a delta far bigger then between me and the cor.

- he didn appear to be swapping gear between idle and tp'ing
- He was tp;ing with weapon skill gear annd DT gear
- his hit rate was 40%
- didnt use haso from /sam ( but did use meditate)
- I dont think I saw him use food

When people dont have the common decency and say maybe i should not join something where im going to be the burden of the group, i dont see what is so wrong in asking for a person to be able to bring something to the table when it is needed.

Sadly we cant shout " must be good enough" because clearly this guy though he was good enough geared for the content.

so there are two ways

Either we shout for some arbitrary condition that will at least remove the worst part of it and put the risk in a more favorable stand
or we will start kicking people after fist run with when you sucked...

Pretty sure the first one is more friendly approach


and im not again helping new people i have farmed plenty of escha gear for new and returning players. or that you are a bad player because you have bad gear. everyone has to start somewhere.
but if you show up to an event where you are basically dragging down everyone else. common sense would say don't join until you are ready. its selfish to think that everyone else should have a worse gain because you cant accept that you are not ready for it


TLDR: there is no good way to establish who is a good player or bad player. so we grab for a bad way because it still better than no way.

I think a lot of players don't realize that they're not actually contributing/helping. They might not have parse or scoreboard so when they've been carried through content before they just assumed they were doing well since the ***died. It often takes taking someone to something and showing them them parse for them to realize just how much of useless turd they are. They still should be able to play the game and enjoy it but they don't have any right to join a party someone else is building. If you're not geared for the content don't expect people to carry you or even bring you. I know a guy on my server who pugs dynaD runs and he's had tanks show up in sparks gear going lets do this! It's not fun watching them struggle to do anything, they feel useless and the entire run is mad at them for being the tank cause they cant preform. The game has no way to tell you if you're able to do the content with your gear/skill and that leaves it entire up to the organizers to figure out. I get called elitist for saying things like no DD should be go on oddy c farms unless they have a solid hybrid and DT sets(in addition to their standard tp/ws sets), but when the dd's die in the first 5 minutes after buffs it's not fun for anyone.

You're right. SE should gate content more often. You shouldn't be allowed to enter Dyna-D with the current requirements. Same goes for Odyssey.

If you're 119 and beat RoV/WoTG, you're in. This is why I don't do PUGs.

If SE actually started increasing ilvl appropriately and allowed us to see another player's ilvl somehow, it could be resolved to some degree...

Ya because making the game even less accessible is the solution.

This needs to happen. All 119 is not 119. Simply being accurate with newest gear being significantly higher than 119 would help. I mean, thats how literally every other games gear checks work.

It's by no means a perfect solution, there is absolutely no way to measure a players capability by anything other than seeing it.

Since even sparks gear is 119, wouldn't knowing someone's ilvl be relatively moot?

Edit: It's 117, I was wrong.

Simon I usually try not to speculate about people, but you strike me as the type who has probably been to one of those cults they call 'school' to practice rituals with calculators. If you wanted to prove that your egghead was bigger than the other cultists, you compared test results. The results were valid for comparison because the variables were removed beforehand. You gather at the same place, at the same time, with the same calculator, with the same #2 pencil, given the same amount of time to answer, give the same amount of time for breaks... it's not a coincidence.



This tech already exists in the game. When you enter salvage you're stripped of your gear and given debuffs to remove your stats/spells/abilities. You could easily change the debuff to a buff that applies stats that would simulate a set of gear. Super big problems? You don't have to carry anything but your calculator.

What's this about cults

You can try to be as funny and enigmatic as you like, but it won't change a fact that none wants to play FFXI naked without gear gathered for years. It's a gear based game, where preparing and executing right gear macros in the right time is one of the biggest skill of the game, so I don't know how you want to make Master Level challenges without gear.

it's 2021, there is no excuse for having to /yell for hours in town just to assamble a group, that feature was already overdue back in the abyssea days and now a decade later we still don't have it.

there are already "skill checks" that are visible from the outside like job master but that's not enough (ty JP bots) so ppl additionally have been asking for gear checks, SE should have picked up on that fact and instead of allocating resources to BS like the mastery rank system they should have added a proper party finder that lets you filter for those gear checks.

also if you still ask for REMA on most DD jobs post ambuscade weapons your probably doing it wrong. a proper DT set like malignance or nyame would be a much better indicator wether or not someone is ready for endgame content.

Gear is just unrealized potential without understanding and proper application. You might have a solid understanding, but most people do not. They navigate to a guide or a forum post and they copy/paste without knowing why the set is suggested or having any context for how to apply it when needed.


I really don't want them to make the new master system lock you out of your gear. I was just making the point that you can display mastery of your job without it. It's not difficult to tell the difference between someone who is mastered and someone who actually plays well.

But like... there's some potential to add real significant stats.

Was just looking at my Cohort Cloak +1's augments and seeing:
[1] Mag. Acc.+100
[2]"Mag. Atk. Bns." +100
[3] All Attr. +20

If you could grind to get stuff like THAT attached to your job (or stuff like TA+5%, STP+20, SB+25, permanent DT II-5%, whatever), maybe worth some hassle to get those stats fulltime without having to wear a piece of gear to get them. The grind will be awful though.

I agree, but then teaching how to use your job specific gear should be included right? So maybe do something that involves gear. It would force people to get some job specific gear to succeed, but why not? We are talking about totally mastering the job right?

If the game has been this way for 19 years and is still attracting tens of thousands of paying customers, maybe it's not a good idea to try and "fix" the problems because maybe those "problems" are why it's still running. FFXI is still relevant because of elitism and grind, if you remove either of these you destroy what makes it good. FFXI at its core is similar to Dark Souls, it forces you to get better to be good at the game (grinding levels, grinding new gear, grinding to gitgud at dodging it's all still time invested).

The best part of FFXI is gearing up, making progress on your character and the only way to make people engage with that process is to instill a need to do so in order to "be the best you can be" or do certain content or perform well.

It's not only the community that does this, it's the game itself.

Sensible elitism is good because it encourages you to gear up, which is the core of what makes FFXI enjoyable. A lack of stuff to progress on turns hardcore players into sourasses, they know this and are giving you more stuff to work on because of it.

Sensible grind is good because grind = gratification in obtaining goals, and longer harder goals = more gratification and more pride in those goals. If you remove the resistance, the goals don't feel impactful anymore.

Positives out of negatives, also ff11 has tiers of elitism and grind for different kinds of players.

On modern mmorpgs it's near impossible for the healers to run out of MP and the whole party to wipe because of you, for tanks it's near impossible to lose aggro for 90% of the fight and people to get decimated left and right because of you, it's impossible to perform so badly on a DPS that you may as well not be there. On modern mmorpgs, if you fail you spawn right at the start again to try again. They do all these things to remove elitism and toxicity, it also makes the game bland as fk and removes all tension and hype at a win.

On FF11 all these things are possible and highly likely unless you go beast mode and gear up to overcome, that's why it's so rewarding and why modern mmorpgs aren't (to me).

I don't want the game handing it to me or wanting me to win, I want to struggle and spend a long time on gearing up and earn the victories.

That’s easy to say when you bought your account. If you actually had to earn what you had, you’d probably think a lot different.

I'm not going to speak for any account buyers or multiboxers, but if someone is a single player with a single character and they don't want to complete all the story/missions, bruv why you even here?

Sure don't lock stuff behind master trials, mastery rank, or whatever else. But locking stuff behind mission completion? That should be a given. Play the game and enjoy the damn story.

I think a lot of people need to take a step back and ask themselves why they're really playing. Surely it isn't because of the rewards themselves, because in literally every MMORPG it just begets more of those same rewards. If you needed a 119-III Tizona and full Malignance in order to beat the story, FFXI would suck eggs.

Endgame rewards are more of a byproduct of playing a fun game, usually with friends we've made along the way. And thanks to the gradually-flattening power curve the game offers, most of that gear is just there to show off how much time you've spent playing and how many adventures you have.

Everything BUT the story.

The gameplay, the cool jobs, the class system, the battle content, the innovative spells/skills, weapons, and updates to monthly content.

The story content in FFXI, IMO, sucks. It is a relic of an era where you could spend months doing it, so it is full of rehashing old crap and filler to keep it interesting while you grind to the next level and find an alliance to do the content. In 2021, the story content is weak and drags on way too long, especially Adoulin. I'd rather watch a filibuster than play that ***again, so, boring. None of them were designed to be done in one sitting, so it all drags out, but so much content is locked behind it, you feel the need to rush it.

I say that as someone that started a new char this past spring specifically to "enjoy" the story content and ignore the endgame. Ha. That worked out well. I actually followed the country missions and halfway through CoP couldn't take it anymore, just started spamming enter. YMMV.

All that said, if I didn't have the friends I played with, I probably would have quit again a few weeks ago.

Definitely in the minority, FFXI has some of the best stories. If you think the annoying time waster stuff is too much try XIVs they have it 10x worse.

Not so much that XIV is worse as it is there's just much, much more of it that you can't ignore.

Both 11 and 14 have good stories, 14 story is also more interactive

Naw its worse, running to grab a cheese sandwich for the 50th time while the world is about to end. The same lame characters sacrificing themselves for the 20th time. Everyone with the same expressions and constant nodding. But i guess we all got different tastes

14's story is good but I agree that most missions are insanely boring and just plain stupid. Nearly all storyline missions are 100% CS and they add those "tasks" in em to give you the idea you actually contributed while in fact you talked to 5 patches of grass so you could start the next long CS.
I'm gonna shut up about another 14 <-> 11 comparison now since most threads end up that way lately.

I think I'd be willing to compromise and say the writing for FFXI is a bit weak. It could be trimmed down quite a bit without losing any connection to any characters. The strengths of FFXI's storytelling lie instead in its world-building, theming, and plot.

Like most things in FFXI, it was never designed to be rushed from start to finish. I think that's why the writing is a little bit excessive as well. You're expected to do 2 or 3 parts of a mission and then take a break to go level up or whatever. So when you do come back they decide to remind you what was going on previously and give you a heads-up as to what's coming next.

One of my favourite things about FFXI is your own involvement in the story. The theme of you being an adventurer is present all throughout. You aren't the main character, you just get caught up in all these crazy shenanigans. At least until Rhapsodies, but at that point it makes sense that you're the nucleus around which all the main characters collect. You aren't some predestined hero, because it wouldn't make sense that there are 1000 of you running around. You're just Max in the Mad Max franchise.